Dance with her ghosts

"Alicent Hightower was one of the most beautiful and highborn ladies of the Reach and also one of the wildest ladies to be seen south of the neck, she preferred unfeminine pursuits and possessed the most fearsome of southern warhorses, a great black stallion named Hades, who terrified the stable masters, and which Lady Alicent rode like a dragon rider."

- The History of the Great Houses of the Reach, by Maester Frey the Forgotten.

Alicent Hightower is born screaming, no matter what the wet nurses do or who is called to calm her down, she screams and screams, and screams some more - until all she can do is cry big, silent tears.

No one can sleep with her deafening screams and Otto often thinks about suffocating his daughter in her cradle, because he is sure that there is no child in the world more troubled than her.

All three times he dared to pick her up resulted in her throwing up on his clothes and smirking - as slyly as a baby could smirk - and then screaming so loudly that the guards nearly arrested him for murder.

It doesn't get better when she grows up.

In fact, she stops crying day and night when she gets past six months, and they have a minute of peace, and then she's learning things and that's where Alicent becomes dangerous, because all of a sudden, she wants to know everything.

She learns to crawl, then she learns to walk and then she learns she can run, and it's when Alicent is two name days old that Otto thinks he should disguise her as a boy and send her out into the freezing cold of the wall, because she's wild.

He and his wife have their first argument in years when he asks if she's sure she didn't steal their only child from a wildling and his wife is absolutely livid and almost sends him to sleep in the kennels and he knows where Alicent got that stubborn streak and wildness.

Truthfully, Otto had heard of the wild ladies that inhabited Westeros, he had heard of the Mormont girls in the North and their assorted bastard children who were claimed to be sired by a bear, but he had never, ever, in this life thought he would be disgraced with a daughter who behaved like she was half animal.

— I want a horse. — screams four-name-day old Alicent, at the top of her lungs in the middle of a major paper review, and Otto wants to smack her in the face, that's an argument he thought he'd won the first time, but apparently it was not yet over.

Alicent is literally chasing him and Otto is man enough to admit he's running from his four-name-day old daughter like she's Balerion reborn, and she always seems to find him, be it the privy, the rooms with her mother or the gods be merciful, on the training grounds - and her eyes flashed like jewels when she heard the swords - and Otto will run away from this conversation for as long as it takes.

— No. — he replies, and wonders if he should look for a maester, because his left eye is twitching from sheer nervousness.

— YES. — Alicent yells back and Otto's right eye starts to twitch more.

— What did we say about screaming, Alicent? — his wife scolds and Otto wonders why Alicent doesn't have her mother's manners.

— I want a horse. — Alicent replies, deliberately and she is screaming , both of Otto's eyes continue to tremble and he can no longer read anything in the papers in front of him, because his vision is blurred from stress.

— All right. — he replies, and slams his hands on the table, Alicent startles and looks up at him with wide brown eyes full of pure joy. — But you're going to take care of it and you're going to help the stable master with it and you're going to feed it and clean it's shit and if it gets sick you're going to be responsible for healing it and if it dies you're going to bury it.

Alicent lets out another scream - Otto knows he's going to go deaf before he even has grandchildren - and runs out of the room, her nanny running after her with a defeated look on her face. He looks at Olenna and can't help but feel his heart soften when she looks at him with warm, loving eyes.

— Isn't feeding, cleaning, and looking after a horse a lot for a four-name-day old girl? — his beloved wife asks and Otto understands her concern, but Alicent will never get a husband if she continues to behave like a wild beast.

— In fact, I hope when her spirit is broken by the hard work of caring for a horse three times her size, she can go back to her embroidery lessons with you. — he says and Olenna laughs, her face tinged with amusement.

— I hope this plan of yours works out, husband. — she says and stands up, leaving the solar quietly.

Otto hopes so, because the marriage prospects worsened considerably after the dinner during which Alicent, in a fit of reckless rage, threw a spoonful of potatoes at the Redwyne heir's face, and started a food fight that left Lord Redwyne covered in potatoes, beets, and lamb sauce.

The plan doesn't work.

Alicent surprisingly takes spectacular care of the big black stallion that Otto got her in mock stubbornness, she names him Hades and Otto wonders where in the Stranger's name she got such a name.

The horse is surprisingly docile - with Alicent the Monster, as she is called, a menace to every keeper in the stables - well looked after and his stall is always clean, with fresh water, food and a few bright red apples, Otto must say he is highly impressed.

Until he discovers that Alicent bribes one of the squires to clean the stable and feed her horse a golden dragon at every moonturn, golden dragons that come out of her grandfather's bag, and Otto curses because this Stranger's child has conquered her grandfather and gained the strongest ally she could ever have.

Alicent rides the damned horse as if she'd been born a stablemaster's daughter and not a lord's, she is a natural in the saddle and if she'd been born a man, Otto would have had the nerve to ask her to squire for one of the kingsguard.

But she's not a man, the gods are cruel like that, and he needs her to become a lady before all her marriage prospects are damned Freys, or worse, a northern barbarians.

Otto's eye starts twitching again and he goes to find the maester before he has a nervous breakdown.